All posts tagged ‘diet’

Dakster Sullivan has started her first meditation class online with the Tergar Learning Center this week. She hopes to learn some basic meditation techniques over the next six weeks that she can later share with you. She is also heavily focused on getting reading for Megacon 2013! This is the biggest convention she attends during the year and she is super excited.

Ariane was figuratively told “in case you were wondering, this did not go well” this week, which was a funny line in Lilo & Stitch but much less fun to hear in person. To boost her crumbling ego, she decided to focus on the people she *could* help. A few thank yous later, she just might crawl out from under that rock.

Kris Bordessa is, yes, revamping for the new year. Her biggest challenge: giving up (most) sugars for 30 days. What’s a girl to do without her wine and chocolate? Apparently, feel better. After more than a week of headaches and cravings, she’s finally feeling utterly awesome. What’s next, world?

Rebecca Angel is feeling relaxed and happy after a couple of slow weeks on vacation celebrating the holidays with her family. She has spent this last week converting thirty-two VHS tapes of silly childhoods movies onto DVDs, but edited. She will give copies to her family. This was long overdue, and a big cross-off on her “life” to-do list!

Kristen Rutherford is back in the Nerdist saltmines tap tap tapping away on the keyboard. There’ll be 10 new shows for BBCA, and it’ll be a part of their epic Saturday Night lineup, come March. This week you can watch her in her monthly #parent hangout on the Geek & Sundry channel — she and Mike Phirman talk with Wil & Anne Wheaton about games — or if you don’t want to look at her face, you can listen to her voice — she’s the guest on Janet Varney’s podcast “The JV Club.”

Brigid‘s finally catching up after the long winter break. This week she’s been painting bugs.

Cathe survived the first week of teaching geeky-preschool to her three-year-old son.

Kay Holt’s successful shrinky self-destruction, with help from an app called MyNetDiary. Photo:Bart Leib

When I was very young, I dreamed of becoming three things as I aged: an astronaut, an actor, and a fat old woman. Although I have celebrated science my whole life and I eventually became a theater major, none of my five-year-old self’s dreams came true. I learned early that, because of some chronic health problems, NASA will never send me into space. And as it turns out, I’m much happier backstage and behind the scenes than I am in the spotlight.

But in my late twenties, I realized that I was well on my way to fulfilling the last fond wish of my childhood. I weighed almost as much as my beloved grandmother, in whose kitchen I grew up eating like I was a small army. I was never a skinny kid, and I never wanted to be a skinny adult. All the thin people in my life were drug addicts or people my folks teased for being “picky eaters” and “health nuts,” so I went for what was behind door number three. Food: all I could afford.

Like many out there, I’ve tried a thousand and one ways to lose weight, with varying degrees of success. I had always avoided Weight Watchers, though. Maybe it was because as a girl I went to weight loss meetings with my mom, a kid in a room full of self-loathing adults. Maybe it was because I didn’t have the time or the interest to track what I ate.

Last year about this time I started hearing more about Weight Watchers Online. It was January, so I was feeling motivated to get fit and start losing weight for real. With the online program, you can opt out of meetings. While I’m sure they’re great for some, I didn’t want to relive those meetings of my youth. And as for that food tracking I didn’t want to do, I discovered that for every food and exercise you enter, you get back something wonderful: data.

Enter your food and exercise in your daily points tracker.

The program gives you a daily and weekly allotment of food points based on your weight, height, gender, and age. If you go over your daily points, you dip into your pool of weekly points. You also track activity points, which can be traded in for more food points.

The data I was generating – my food points, my activity points, and my weekly weight – made me start to think of the whole endeavor in a new light. My body became my science experiment. My experiment was helped tremendously by Weight Watcher’s introduction of progress reports, all my stats at a glance. It’s a data geek’s dream.

The progress report, an at-a-glance look at each week.

I grew to be able to predict with a high degree of accuracy what my weight would be when I stepped on the scale based purely on that week’s data. If I went more than 15 points into my weekly allotment of food points, but it was coupled with exercise over 20 points, I probably stayed the same weight. If my exercise exceeded 40 points, unless it was a week of a lot of liquid calories (oh, red wine and lattes, you keep trying to bring me down…) I lost 1-2 pounds.

This is the kind of graph you want to see when you're losing weight. Not pictured: the holiday uptick.

In weeks where my experiment fails me and there’s weight gain, I know precisely why, and even with my holiday gain I’m not discouraged. I know my body and I know I can continue to lose more weight. I’ve lost a net of 20 pounds so far, and I’ll have fun with scientific inquiry along my way to lose more.

We often view ourselves as separate from nature, but here is the rub: Our cultures have changes. Our behaviors have changed. Our diets have changed. Our medicine has changed. But our bodies are the same, essentially unaltered from 6,000 generations ago, when going for a run meant chasing after a wounded animal or fleeing a healthy one, water was drank out of cupped hands, and the sky still cracked wide open to reveal millions of stars, white dots as unexplainable as existence itself. Our bodies remember who we are.

Whether writing about villages terrorized by man-eating tigers or people so wracked by illness they dose themselves with parasites, Dunn’s work is a page-turner. A few facts gleaned from this enticing book to tantalize potential readers.

*Amylase, one of the enzymes in our saliva, aids in the breakdown of starches. Some people have up to 16 times more amylase than others, and may extract more energy from the same amount of dietary starches. As Dunn writes, “One man’s survival gene is another’s belly roll.”

*Disgust has a biological basis. Simply viewing a photo of diseased individuals can ramp up our immune response. And people living in areas where pathogens are more prevalent tend to be less culturally and individually open, perhaps to protect against illness.

*Our appendix, long thought to be vestigial, contains immune tissue and antibodies. It may be an incubator of beneficial bacteria, necessary to replenish the gut after a challenge by pathogens.